Many appliances, including cooking ranges and laundry dryers, are powered by natural gas or manufactured gases. During manufacturing and assembly, these appliances must be configured to accept a domestic gas supply. The industry itself is fairly mature, product volumes are high and profit margins are relatively low. Consequently, modest reductions in component material costs and labor can translate into large profit increases for manufacturers.
Gas supply configurations for these appliances must be fabricated with high reliability given the inherent safety aspects of gas-supplied appliances. Further, dimensional control is important in these configurations, particularly between the gas burner and the tubing that supplies the burner with gas. In addition, the configurations employed in these appliances ideally should have low material cost, minimal components, and be amenable to repeatable, simple manufacturing assembly methods. Given the importance of dimensional control between the gas supply tubing and the gas burner, many conventional gas burner modules suffer from relatively low manufacturing yields.
Consequently, there is a need for gas supply module designs (and associated assembly methods) that can be manufactured with low labor and material costs, possess less parts, maintain high reliability, and/or possess good dimensional control.